How To Acquire Your First Home Easier

When it comes to managing your wealth and investing in a property, owning a home is still part of the fabric of the Australian dream, and for many of us, turning this dream into a reality starts with securing a home loan.

Securing a home loan isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible—even if you’ve got a little debt.

The housing market in Australia has been on a rise for several years, and there are mixed expectations over its direction going forward. Some think it will continue, others think it is set for whathas been termed “sustained weakness”. What you’re going to need to do is purchase a home in a market with historical stability, if at all possible.

This is going to take some time; you can’t just go with the first house you like. Not unless you can afford wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in the fullness of time. You need to look at the interest rate on home loans, you need to look at payment plans, neighborhood, property appreciation, and demographic shift.

Where are people moving to, where are they coming from, and from which demographic? Think of human traffic and trends like tributaries, streams, or rivers. A clear mountain stream has less pollution than a river used as a dump in a metropolitan area. Well, many larger cities have difficulties related to the housing market because of their very size.

Granted, you have more amenities available to you, but you’re going to experience market fluctuations that can be fundamentally detrimental in the long-run. Meanwhile, smaller municipalities often have better buying options, but feature fewer available amenities. The solution between the two seems to be the suburbs, but even these can end up being an unsafe bet if you choose the wrong neighborhood.

Once you do find your ideal living situation, you want topay off the cost on it as fast as you can. Mortgages can drag on for decades, and many are designed that way from the very beginning. But the housing market you’re in, even if it’s a good one, likely won’t remain “static”. It’s going to change. Even the best bets are unexpectedly trumped sometimes.

As you look for a home, you want to find one that will have the fewest negative structural anomalies, the most stable neighborhood, and which can be augmented such that utility expenses can be reduced.

From there, you want to look at perhaps sourcing renters. If you’re in a family and can secure a duplex situation, there are often additional tax benefits worth considering.

The bottom line is that buying a home is expensive, and unless you’re able to spend without difficulty, you’re going to have to make some compromises. But if you compromise early and pay off the cost of your home with quickness, then you can sell it and convert the profit into a better property, giving you greater choice through resource expansion.

Whether you buy large or small, suburban or outback, there are options out there which will fit your needs. The final advice here is to prepare for the future, not only “today”. If you bring that reasoning to the home-buying game, you’ll find a much more reliable property.